Why are we still prosecuting marijuana use?

The Trudeau Liberals came to power on October 19 promising to legalize cannabis for personal use, undoing a policy error lingering from the early 20th Century.

That error was a costly one for many thousands of otherwise mainstream Canadians — mostly young people — who have had to carry the burden of a criminal record for the balance of their lives. The stigma of a criminal record turned out, in time, to be more harmful to their lives than the use of cannabis. “The continued prohibition of cannabis,” declared the late Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, echoing the Le Dain Commission from the early 1970s, “jeopardizes the health and well-being of Canadians much more than does the substance itself.”

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML Canada), this country’s oldest drug policy reform NGO, worked hard to elect the Trudeau Liberals. We took seriously their commitment to evidence-based policy making — a welcome change from their Conservative predecessors. April 20 is a global day of protest against cannabis prohibition, and we’re once again calling on the prime minister to issue a ‘stand down’ order to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada on all cannabis-related charges which don’t involve violence or other Criminal Code offences.

We view this as a moral imperative: No person should be prosecuted on the basis of a policy error when that error is about to be reversed.

Cannabis prohibition represents an anomaly in Canadian legislation. It was enacted without deliberation, without findings of fact, hearings with experts or parliamentary debate. Cannabis simply appeared in the Schedule of Prohibited Substances one day in April 1923. There exists no paper trail to point to a rationale or justification for prohibition — and it wasn’t until 1947 that the first actual arrest for possession was made.

Prohibition was always the classic ‘solution in search of a problem’ — a product of a racist moral panic against non-Anglo minorities that became a movement culminating in a global war on drugs.

It’s the kids without means — the sons and daughters of those without money or connections — who suffer most from the stigma of a criminal record.

That war is finally winding down (all wars end eventually) and the fraud that enabled cannabis prohibition has been discredited. Although it’s hard to imagine how compensation or reparations might work, what matters now is that the Government of Canada cease and desist prosecuting cannabis users, growers and sellers and put a new regime in place.

Why the urgency? Because “the uneven application of the law … raises the issue of fairness and justice” – that’s a line from the Senate committee’s 2002 report on illegal drugs that every Liberal senator referenced in the Open Caucus on Cannabis Legalization on February 24. And it’s the kids without means — the sons and daughters of those without money or connections — who suffer most from the stigma of a criminal record.

Prohibition exacerbates existing class and racial disparities without doing a thing to restrict use. This is true of all illicit drugs, of course; it’s especially true of cannabis because it is so widely used in Canada.

And it’s all so expensive. Senator Nolin reported that cannabis offences alone cost the Canadian taxpayer $5 million in 2000-2001. How much more since then? “The main social costs of cannabis,” Nolin concluded, “are a result of its continued criminalization, while the consequences of its use represent a small fraction of the social costs attributable to the use of illegal drugs.”

NORML Canada does not endorse or condemn cannabis use for any person or reason. NORML Canada aspires to bring legislation regarding cannabis into agreement with the best evidence and practices of public policy. Canadians have learned a hard and expensive lesson about cannabis prohibition — its high costs, its lack of tangible benefits — but we need not continue to visit those costs on our citizens going forward.

The Trudeau Liberals promised to legalize and regulate. There is no reason to continue to prosecute and incarcerate people simply because “the law is the law” — when the law clearly isn’t working.

Prosecution and incarceration of cannabis possessors, growers and sellers does harm without purpose, without benefit, without positive consequence. Canadians are on the cusp of undoing a tragedy. This government will go down in history as reversing a harmful error in social policy.

Imposing a moratorium on existing prosecutions and incarcerations is the right thing to do. But it must be done now.

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